Wait did I miss something big? Does Lemmy now federate with Mastodon somehow? How does that work?
Comment on Threads is automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed
zak@social.goodanser.com 6 months ago@Minotaur @henfredemars @technology You are using an account on lemm.ee to reply to someone commenting from an account on infosec.pub in a community hosted on lemmy.world.
Those are all running Lemmy software, but I am replying from an account on social.goodanser.com, which is running Mastodon software.
That's federation. We're all using different service providers, sometimes even different software, but we can talk to each other because they speak the same protocol, called ActivityPub. Threads.net has announced plans to support ActivityPub and conducted some limited trials, which they're in the process of expanding. They claim they intend to support it fully, but only for users who opt in to it.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
4am@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Always has. Anything using ActivittPub can interoperate
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
I was under the impression that it theoretically could but wasn’t set up in a way that made this possible. But perhaps I was mistaken.
How do I access Mastodon content using my account here then?
zephr_c@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Threads hasn’t had federation enabled until now, but you’ve always been able to interact with Mastodon… sort of. The Lemmy UI doesn’t really have a good way of finding Mastodon posts that don’t tag a Lemmy community or of following Mastodon users, but if they do tag a community the Mastodon post will show up as a Lemmy post in that community.
DesolateMood@lemm.ee 6 months ago
As far as I know it’s always been this way. At least since I joined during the whole reddit fiasco
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
How do you access Mastodon content in Lemmy?
Minotaur@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Very interesting. Appreciate the response. Didn’t know big companies like meta had any interest in the whole “federation” gig, seeing that it seems a little “opposed” to the kind of big revenue that supports tech companies like that
Zak@lemmy.world 6 months ago
And now I’m commenting from a lemmy.world account because Lemmy from Mastodon has some rough edges like the need to tag the community in my comment above to ensure it actually reaches the lemmy.world server.
Tumblr and Flickr are also talking about ActivityPub support, but it’s not clear if or when that will actually happen. It would make more sense to me for those services since they’re fairly small and it’s a way to substantially increase the possible audience. It’s not clear what Meta’s motivations are here, though a motivation some have proposed is that they’re trying to get in front of potential regulation. The EU Digital Markets Act, for example requires some services to interoperate with competitors, and having one of its new products join an established standard protocol is a way to say “you don’t need to regulate us, we already do the thing”.
I don’t think their blocking of comments mentioning Pixelfed is intentional. Pixelfed is not popular enough for Meta to care about as a competitor, and blocking mentions of competitors has never been among their tactics.
Minotaur@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Appreciate this response, it seems to make a lot of sense to me.
I think people on sites like Lemmy and similar can kind of uhh… overestimate how much anyone outside of a very niche crowd care about the whole “federalization” movement, and yeah it seems unlikely to me that Threads is going out of its way to shadowban a niche competitor like Pixelfed
Uvine_Umbra@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
But it actually isn’t, because the largest driver of growth for platforms like facebook & instagram is the already present userbase.
That userbase will always be there if the programs are all federated together, so creating a new platform is now just making a better site versus that and bringing in the userbase.